11–20 of 432 posts
There is a thorough book on this topic, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. Highly recommend it if you're interested in the causes of so much of our dysfunction in housing costs. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/634461/paved-paradi...
Car free areas also raise objections about accessibility for the disabled. How do you get your wheelchair to the middle of that car free area half a mile from the public transit stop closes to where you want to go.
It’s one thing to ditch parking minimums, but it has to be matched with investment in public transit. Simply eliminating parking spots doesn’t eliminate demand when there are no other options for getting around. And I suspect the public transit investment will be way more controversial and difficult to implement.
Before: If you build a building of this size, you MUST also build at least X parking spaces. Now: If you build a building of this size, you MAY build as many parking spaces as you think you need. Seems like a strict improvement to me.
Without readily available and reliable public transportation this is just lining developers pockets (because fewer parking spaces needed means more units they can build).
It’s one thing to ditch parking minimums, but it has to be matched with investment in public transit. Simply eliminating parking spots doesn’t eliminate demand when there are no other options for getting around. And I suspect the public transit investment will be way more controversial and difficult to implement.
If there are truly no other options, then the developers are going to have to severely reduce the price of their real estate or choose not to build there. This is simply taking an implicit approach to things, which may or may not work. If anything doing this is a way for cities to implicitly get citizens on board for investing more in public transit. All of the new apartment buildings in the hip parts of town don't h…
True. But only to a limited extent as long as demand remains significantly higher relative to supply. e.g. if you're moving to a city due to work etc. and and have limited you're much more willing to compromise (use street parking, private lots some distance away etc,).
It’s one thing to ditch parking minimums, but it has to be matched with investment in public transit. Simply eliminating parking spots doesn’t eliminate demand when there are no other options for getting around. And I suspect the public transit investment will be way more controversial and difficult to implement.
Ditch off street parking and buildings will become much more dense, which in turn will make them more valuable (manhattan land is more valuable than suburbia), smaller (because people can't afford much space when land is expensive), which increases density further. End result: Nobody has space for a car, lots of demand for public transit, makes it worth building public transit. Unfortunately, there probably will be t…
The amount of money we collectively spend subsidizing driving is utterly insane. Yet every public transit measure is jet with the same tired dogma of “it’ll raise our taxes” or “it will run at a loss”. Street parking tons at a loss. Why is this never brought up? Significant money is spent by the likes of the remaining Koch brothers to fight public transit infrastructure in every city. Yet taking drivers off the road…
You know who wants tons of parking spots? Those people with their Suburbans and 6 kids who only come downtown for a sports game once every 3 months but complain about how scary and stressful being downtown is.
If you want a concrete example of this- when Austin caused Uber/Lyft to exit the market in 2016 (iirc) based on them "not fingerprinting drivers" one of the big arguments for letting them leave from one of (or the most) important council members was some comment along the lines of, "Well I've never needed an Uber/Lyft before in my life. Why can't you use cabs?" Ironically this person lives in Clarksville (or Tarrytown) which is one of the most expensive suburbs right outside of downtown and they probably never NEED an Uber. I bartended back in 2016 when this was going on and it SUCKED when they left. We had already gotten them into Austin WAY later than most other cities and it finally felt like I could travel around without a headache and the bullshit that yellow cabs bring with it ("Sorry sir, my credit card is not working tonight! Cash only but we're here already, so you must find ATM!")
People who actually go out and do things and didn't want to have to go back to cabs not showing up, potentially getting a dwi/dui, etc were angry beyond belief at the council.
https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/news/2016-05-14/dear-m...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Before: If you build a building of this size, you MUST also build at least X parking spaces. Now: If you build a building of this size, you MAY build as many parking spaces as you think you need. Seems like a strict improvement to me.
It’s not. I’ve lived in neighborhoods that did this and it was a nightmare. All street parking filling up by 4pm. Half hour walks to your car. Neighbors keying each others cars for taking up a space for too long. Guests basically just being SOL - you’d literally be unable to have guests over because if you left to pick them up there’d be no spot when you got back, and if they drove themselves they’d never find a spot…
EDIT I am rate-limited so can't reply, but this part:
"If you have 200 cars"
This is only the case if the demand for parking / driving is perfectly inelastic, which would be quite extraordinary. Empirically, when you charge for parking or institute toll roads, traffic tends to fall, in some cases sharply (because many journeys are low value). I repeat: if the parking spaces are still congested, the price should be raised until they're not.
Assuming the number of cars would stay the same is like the lump-of-labour fallacy. Lump of metal fallacy?
Then there's the supply side: guess what, that's not inelastic either! If it's profitable to provide parking, someone will build dedicated facilities for it and charge for their use. This may be an alien concept for some of you, but only because parking minimums cause such oversupply that they can't be run profitably. In cities where parking is priced sanely, it's unremarkable to see this.
"Cars will just overflow into adjacent neighbourhoods" okay, so charge for parking there too, until they don't. Duh.
I don't see why cars should get to sit somewhere rent-free but a human being can't. Urban land is valuable; if you want to occupy it, pay what it costs, ya fuckin welfare queens.
my language is harsh but it's hard not to be when I see so many americans (it's always americans) confidently claiming that life is impossible without free parking. but I live in a city without free parking and things work just fine. I can literally just look out of my window and it disproves all the doomsaying. every commute and trip to the supermarket is uneventful and not ruined in the slightest by a lack of free parking. you pay for parking and it's fine. it's literally just fine. I went to virginia one time, I saw literal acres and acres and acres of empty parking space, oceans of asphalt; nobody seemed to think anything of it but I thought it was mad, like some kind of braindead economic allocation fuckup from a communist country that we'd all laugh about. I wanted to shout: you are being terraformed by asphalt-based lifeforms! why do I have to explain to americans how a free market price mechanism works? on a forum for people to shill their california startups? I shouldn't need to tell you this!
It’s one thing to ditch parking minimums, but it has to be matched with investment in public transit. Simply eliminating parking spots doesn’t eliminate demand when there are no other options for getting around. And I suspect the public transit investment will be way more controversial and difficult to implement.
If there are truly no other options, then the developers are going to have to severely reduce the price of their real estate or choose not to build there. This is simply taking an implicit approach to things, which may or may not work. If anything doing this is a way for cities to implicitly get citizens on board for investing more in public transit. All of the new apartment buildings in the hip parts of town don't h…
There is a thorough book on this topic, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. Highly recommend it if you're interested in the causes of so much of our dysfunction in housing costs. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/634461/paved-paradi...
The amount of money we collectively spend subsidizing driving is utterly insane. Yet every public transit measure is jet with the same tired dogma of “it’ll raise our taxes” or “it will run at a loss”. Street parking tons at a loss. Why is this never brought up? Significant money is spent by the likes of the remaining Koch brothers to fight public transit infrastructure in every city. Yet taking drivers off the road…
But really, your whole life is sustained by providers driving. Taxes in the city comes from humans being able to physically move their bodies to the right location.
I mean, wouldn't it be ideal to get all the benefits of a complex industrial society without a complex industry? It sure would.